Hi, Meihan! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

Hi! I’m from Singapore, born and raised! My family is Chinese Singaporean and I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Singapore’s very mixed community, which loosely comprises of people of Malay, Chinese, and Indian heritage, as well as distinct cultures like the Peranakans and Eurasians. There is a huge array of different religions and spiritual belief systems in Singapore, but we all have one common, healthy fear and respect of hantu.

Like many Singaporeans, I grew up with ghost stories – they are part of our lives, because for most of us, spirits, ghosts and gods of land and sea are everywhere, all around, all the time. Hantu is a handy Malay word that refers to ghosts, monsters, and malevolent spirits. My family is Buddhist on paper, but Southeast Asian Buddhism is quite distinct from the ‘standard’ understanding of Buddhism, and incorporates lots of older gods, rituals and beliefs. As a child it was completely normal for me to get exorcised now and then, have talismans stitched into clothes, and have a nun trying to cure my asthma with a bath in flowers.

When I grew older, and especially when I met my Scottish husband, I started to realise how startling our way of life must be to those who have no equivalant traditions. I started imagining what it would be like for someone who had no knowledge of Southeast Asia, to come into our community and be immediately beset by one of our much-loved, much-feared hantu. And that’s when a story idea started form!

When did you first discover your love for wriBng and stories?

I’ve loved writing and stories for as long as I can remember! I first wrote my own ‘book’ when I was about seven, written and drawn on foolscap and stapled together. It was about a haunted doll. I grew up with ghost stories, and they’ve always been my absolute favourite.

Quick lightning round! Tell us:

• The first book you ever remember reading: The first English books I owned were Ladybird books: I remember Cinderella in three dresses of pink satin, blue silk with silver net, and finally an enormous sparkling white and gold dress. Also a version of the Magic Paintbrush which was full of what would now be considered horrifically racist caricatures of Chinese people, but we didn’t know better then! I remember being perplexed, because I didn’t know a single Chinese person that looked anything like those characters!
• The one that made you want to become an author: I can only choose one? Oh dear. Probably some combination Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre and Carrie, if we’re just talking English language books.
• The one that you can’t stop thinking about: That’s a lot! But I’ll go with Jane Eyre.

The Enigmatic Madam Ingram is the sequel to The Formidable Miss Cassidy and it’s out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Monstrous Malay Magic Woman’s… Daughter.

For readers who haven’t picked up The Formidable Miss Cassidy, what can readers expect?

Don’t worry, The Enigmatic Madam Ingram can be read on its own! The tale partly investigates the mystery of how Miss Cassidy, the slightly-magical Scots governess, ended up in Singapore in the first place. Apart from that, Madam Ingram – the daughter of a Monstrous Malay Magic Woman, and bearer of a particularly horrible curse – has her own tale to tell. It crosses from the Scots highlands to the islands of the Malay Archipelago, through the tea planatations of Kerala and right into the bustling port of colonial Singapore.

And for those who have, what’s to come in the sequel?

More Malay magic, light and dark; more mysteries to be solved; more ghosts to appease; and most of all, Southeast Asia’s most terrifying female hantu.

Another mysterious British woman has arrived in Singapore, but this time she isn’t a governess. Letty Ingram carries a strange curse that she believes is connected to her Malayan mother, who crossed the seas to conquer high society in Great Britain over fifty years ago. She’s now returned to colonial Malaya and Singapore to see if she can solve the mystery.

Meanwhile, a certain Singaporean Chinese merchant has been seeing a strange, dancing wayang kulit ghost. Who is she? Why is she haunting him? What’s her connection to Letty Ingram… and what is the secret of the lady bomoh, Letty’s mama, that binds them all?

Also, can he convince Miss Cassidy to get involved? Purely to help Letty, of course, and not for any other reasons at all…

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed wriBng or exploring further?

I enjoy writing all my characters! In this book, I also included a character who is a real historical person – Cora Pearl, at one point the world’s most famous and fabulous courtesan, of whom I’ve always been an admirer.

I especially loved constructing the character and story of Bungadarah (which translates to Blood Flower), because she represents many forms of monstrousness, rage, rebellion, and all-encompassing, all-destroying love.

Did you face any challenges whilst wriBng the sequel? How did you overcome them?

This story takes place across multiple timelines, and this was very tricky to navigate. My editor, the incredible Jason Erik Lundberg, suggested creating an Excel spreadsheet to coordinate them, which worked great! On top of that, because Cora Pearl is a real person, I used known reference points in her life and career to fix certain immutable dates, and that formed the basis of a lot of important plot points.

What’s next for you?

The third book of the trilogy, The Mystical Mister Kay, is currently in the process of making its way to the U.S and U.K!

Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up? Any you’ve read so far this year that you’ve enjoyed?

That’s a lot of books again, haha! I will take the chance to plug a couple of other Singaporean writers:

The Archaelogy of Falling Worlds by Megan Chee, a really fun cyberpunk-style save-the-world adventure through a wild and amazing universe, set in a place where people (loosely speaking) and artefacts and whole buildings just fall from the sky, and nobody knows why. She has wings, he’s a clone, the cat is not a cat.

Small Bites, by Eliane Boey – a short and gloriously strange story about a woman juggling family expectations and cultural obligations, who loses the ability to feel hunger, and wonders if she might be going slightly mad. There’s a spider.

Delay – A Comics Anthology – a collection of extremely moving stories presented in graphic novel form by the publisher Difference Engine, on the theme of what it means to be ‘delayed’, in life, love and everything in-between.

Will you be picking up The Enigmatic Madam Ingram? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Q&A: Meihan Boey, Author of ‘The Enigmatic Madam Ingram’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

About The Formidable Miss Cassidy: A Scottish governess arrives in Singapore to take up her new post, only to find a host of problems await that require her very unique skills in this award-winning and incredibly entertaining historical fantasy novel. The Formidable Miss Cassidy arrives in U.S bookshelves on 16 September from Harper Perennial.

Picture this. It’s 1890s colonial Singapore. You’re a respectable governess from Great Britain, one who just might bear some resemblance to the mythical Mary Poppins (and also to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but we digress).

You, Miss Cassidy, have been hired to chaperone the last living daughter of a British family in Singapore. You disembark into a new, sweltering, cheerfully chaotic world of sights, smells and scenes both intriguing and perplexing.

You’re unfazed. You’re adventurous. You’re ready to face this brand new world, with all its challenges.

But then you meet your employer, and you hear the whispers.

“They are haunted by a pontianak”.

“What is a pontianak?” you ask. But nobody wants to tell you. The old Chinese amah, the young Malay street vendor, the handsome Indian law derk, the flirtatious Straits Chinese businessman – they’re welcoming and friendly, but they won’t answer.

Well, it’s best you find out, and soon, before you find yourself bereft of home, employment, and reputation, in this alien land far away.

Welcome to the world of The Formidable Miss Cassidy.

*

If you’ve never met a pontianak (thank goodness), you’ll get to know one in the pages of The Formidable Miss Cassidy. In fact, the pontianak, and the other hantu (spirits) of my part of the world, is the reason this book exists. Why should we in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines etc have a monopoly on the gruesome nightmare beasts of our childhood? Share and share alike, I say!

And the most famous nightmare by far is my lady Miss P (we don’t say her name after 8pm, and I don’t know what time you’ll be reading this…).

Throughout Southeast Asia, everyone knows her. She has a variety of different names; in Singapore, she is the pontianak. She’s hard to describe, this monstrous female, to someone who has not grown up alongside us. Part vampire, part avenging fury, part Struwwelpeter, all horror.

She haunts our childhoods, a creature more terrifying and complex than anything Hollywood could imagine. She is a terror so grim, Stephen King would quake; a monster so unstoppable, Dracula would run screaming.

She has two faces, and first presents as a woman of astounding beauty. Her long dark hair unwinds in the night breeze. Her nails are long, graceful, sharp, like a Thai dancer’s gleaming extensions. She infuses your senses with her frangipani perfume. She haunts the night with her high, birdlike laughter. Her voice seems far away – but she is right behind you.

The last thing you see will be the transformation of her beautiful face to hideousness. The last thing you feel will be her nails, plunging into your belly, eviscerating you body and soul. The last thing you hear will be a childlike cackle, like the call of a koel. Ke ke ke ke

But who is she, you ask? She must have come from somewhere…?

Well, she comes from the dark places of Southeast Asia, going back generations beyond reckoning. Wherever women have been wronged, the pontianak has risen.

Her exact origins are muddied, but most regional folktales agree she is a wronged woman, either one who has died in childbirth, or the spirit of that wronged woman’s stillborn daughter. (The word ‘anak’ means ‘child’). A creature of rage, she rises because someone has robbed her unfairly of life.

She lives in banana trees, and to this day you will find shrines and offerings amid many of the banana groves of Southeast Asia, notwithstanding that we are almost all now Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and so forth, none of which religions prescribe a particular caution or reverence towards banana trees. In Singapore, where young men serve mandatory national service and are compelled to go thrashing through what remains of our jungles, it is standard practice to apologise, profusely, to a tree before peeing on it, and to avoid damaging banana trees altogether. After all, you don’t know whose home that tree is.

But the most terrifying thing about the pontianak is that her victims are not confined to a type. She is an equal-opportunity huntress – for preference she gravitates towards pregnant women (out of resentment, perhaps?) and wayward men, but she will take anyone who stumbles across her path. Nobody is safe amid the banana trees at midnight.

In popular culture, however, she has long been reinvented into our personal avenging Fury. Books, movies and stories told around campfires whisper the same cautionary tale – primarily to men.

You’d better behave. Be a good boy and go home to your wife. Leave your wife alone at night to go carousing, and the pontianak will be waiting for you under the light of the full moon. You’ll be mesmerised by her beauty, and lean in for a kiss. And she will – pop! – suck your eyeballs right out of your head.

(One assumes, in this day and age, that the pontianak – who has never been picky, after all – will render the same service regardless of your gender and sexual identity.)

You can’t blame me for wanting the rest of the world to meet her, can you?

The pontianak is a monster, but we are proud of her. She is Queen of the Monstrous Feminine. A story told at a time when women had limited power or protection, she was our last resort. It was the looming threat of her unstoppable vengeance that allowed vulnerable women to warn men: be careful how you treat me.

Her story has lasted millenia, alongisde all the women she has perhaps saved.

Are there ways to escape her? Well, I’ll let you find out, alongside Miss Cassidy.

*

It’s a warm evening in 1890s Singapore. Miss Cassidy’s British employer, the perilously and mysteriously sickly Captain Bendemeer, is walking beneath the banana trees in his garden. It is late. The moon is bright.

Miss Cassidy is paying close attention.

The scent of frangipani is rising…

The post Mary Poppins Meets A Pontianak appeared first on The Nerd Daily.